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ESA's Cluster Spacecraft Makes Shocking Discovery
A recent observation by the ESA's Cluster Spacecraft was able to finally prove a 20-year-old theory. "On 24 January 2001, the four Cluster spacecraft were flying at an approximate altitude of 105 000 kilometres, in tetrahedron formation. Each spacecraft was separated from the others by a distance of about 600 kilometres. With such a distance between them, as they approached the bow shock, scientists expected that every spacecraft would record a similar signature of the passage through this region. Instead, the readings they got were highly contradictory. They showed large fluctuations in the magnetic and electric field surrounding each spacecraft. They also revealed marked variations in the number of solar wind protons that were reflected by the shock and streaming back to Sun."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Wesley Crusher testified that the squadron was in Diamond Slot formation around Titan.
WTF does that mean?
I am SO not a rocket scientist.
I am a leaf on the wind
I'm sorry but did anyone else think of a Kolvoord Starburst?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Duty
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
I have nothing to say and I'm saying it.
I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Is there a Coles notes version?
Queue Electric Universe pseudo-science in 3... 2... 1...
Because, of course, electrical engineers and comparative mythologists make great astrophysicists!
... didn't have to look up tetrahedron because they roll d4's every weekend?
(IANAL)
...if you were to say it in ENGLISH????
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
So What does it all mean, Basil?
We as voters have given up essential liberty. We hoped to purchase a little temporary safety. We in fact deserve neither
Come on guys, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the implications!
I'm sorry but did anyone else think of a Kolvoord Starburst?
;P
At least one other person was as dorky as you. I'm sure many more will follow.
PS: that other person wasn't me
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
YOu could have at least posted the answer too.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Who else didn't know what a tetrahedron was until the above poster noted that it was the shape of a 4 sided die?
The great thing about science out in space is that it yields BOTH amazing results AND really neat pictures.
... to take more than 6 years to make a discovery from this data.
Too much time in Ibiza I suppose.
No; however, I did have to look up bow shock, which frankly I think probably should have been linked in the summary.
Basically it's the 'wave' that precedes the sun or a planet as it passes through space, somewhat similar to the standing wave that you'd see in front of a big tanker ship going through the water. (Particularly one without a bulbous bow.) Rather than water, it's the solar wind that's being disrupted by the body's passage.
Neat diagram on Wikipedia, too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I am really truly shocked to hear this! Can you believe this ?!
I find it hard to say that this finding is recent ... I mean it was done in 2001 ... Right? Don't care anyway.
The boundary of pretty much everything we see is turbulent.
I would not expect a static fixed line.
From ferns to coastlines to mandelbrot sets, throughout the solar system and around galaxies and out into the universe at large.
liqbase
Well, I understand more or less what the article is about (although they said it in a very long winded way), but I'm thinking unless you're a astrophysicist, are studying particle physics, or possible electro-magnetic phenomena then this is a rather dry article.
It's my understanding based on the article that what they discovered (or more accurately proved) was that the bow shock produced by the solar wind colliding with earths magnetosphere is not actually a single giant bow shock, but more like a whole bunch of continually reforming bow shocks stacked on top of each other. Of course, I'm not a physicist, so I could be wrong in that interpretation. Also, it doesn't seem as if this discovery has any immediately applicable implications but is more of a hey, that's kind of neat, type thing.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Coincidence? I think not.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Why is this discovery so shocking if there is a 20-year-old theory that explains the observations?
Usually the most shocking discoveries are the ones not described by any theories.
sometimes people need a slap on the back not in the face.
back on topic re: gf's...man sometimes they do that. if you are at fault im sure you ll figure it out. just remember it cuts both ways and relationships *demand* communication that is at least honesty and hard work.
back on topic re: rocket ships...wth is this article about?? are they gonna find us a FTL drive? cuz if not im not really interested.
"PhysOrg" means Physics, right? Well then, show me the numbers. And probably a graph or two. FFS, since when does "highly contradictory" pass for information?
Were the differences well within the error bars? I'm going with the latter until someone pastes a link with meat on its bones.
I come here for the love
"Hallowed are the Ori."
That sux dude, but to be honest, i doubt the slashdot community will care. Having been thru a 6 month depression caused by an evil witch i can give the following advice: get a gym membership and start working out. Im serious, every couple days. the testosterone produced from working out makes you feel like 150% better.
my membership cost me about 140 bucks for 4 months + any suppliments I buy. I was a skinny 155 pounds before about a month ago, now I feel great about life and im starting to see the results of my routine.
If you have to start with a larger frame, i would recommend starting off with some aerobic activity, like running. proper diet and exorcise saved my life, Literally.
Also, hang out with your friends more, they will help.
oh, and stay away from the booze and weed, that makes it worse.
...to realign the deflector dish.
Unlike Fox News, CNN, and the rest of the mainstream media reporters, researchers in science fields often do investigation into their findings.
The research was published in March. I think most of the time however was spent deciding a title, "Nonstationarity and reformation of high-Mach-number quasiperpendicular shocks: Cluster observations"
Imagine a Beowulf clus...oh wait...
Umm... I think the headline is supposed to be a joke. The discovery was made at the Earth's "bow shock," therefore it is "shocking." Ha ha ha. Apparently neither the readers of /. nor the person who wrote the article have a sense of humor.
you're a geek, you read slashdot and you actually had a gf? you're like way ahead of 99% of the people here. quit bitching
There is much about our world we don't yet know or understand. My thoughts first turned to Tesla on reading the summary, primarily the stories regarding him pulling energy from a natural flow of energy. Your comment makes me wonder further if this or similar phenomena could be used for energy storage or data storage. The big question of course being how we tap into it, which I surely can't answer because I don't even have the level of physics background to be asking the question or making the suggestion.
How is proving a 20 year old theorem a "shocking discovery"? Sure, an unexpected realisation/proof of an old theory, but surely not a discovery. ...Oh, wait, this is /.
Nevermind
It is a pun on "bow shock," the phenomenon that was observed by the spacecraft.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
[sigh] me... :(
Which in a way is odd, as I never got that into D&D and I haven't used a 4-sided die in many years.
Still sad.
Nothing to see here
...it was the rocket scientists who didn't know, so that means you ARE a rocket scientist!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...didn't have to look up tetrahedron because they roll d4's every weekend?
Who else rolls 4 J's every weekend?
The data discussed in the article were from 2001, but the final analysis was only just published this year.
Before the data from the spacecraft could be analyzed by the scientists, the data had to be calibrated and checked for anything weird that could have been introduced when they were transmitted from the spacecraft to the ground. The scientists who did this study probably used data from several instruments on board the spacecraft - the magnetic field instrument, electric field instrument, electron detectors, ion detectors, and plasma wave instruments. In order to get access to these data sets, the scientists had to contact the institutions that built the various instruments on board the spacecraft to get permission to use the data in their study.
Once the scientists assembled all the necessary data sets, they had to screen the data for bow shock crossings. Spacecraft like the Cluster satellites can record data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so there are a lot of data to search for events. You can eliminate some time periods right away using the orbit data, since the bow shock will only be observable over certain parts of the orbit. However, detecting features like the bow shock is not always easy to automate, so some poor graduate student probably had to spend a lot of time making plots of the data and going through them by hand to find candidates for events showing the type of shock structures described in the article. Also, the Cluster mission is actually 4 satellites, so to do a study like this, the scientists actually had to look at the magnetic and electric fields, particles, and plasma waves observed by all four satellites and compare the observations by the four satellites.
Once the data analysis was finished, the scientists may have done some modeling to compare with the theory. I wouldn't know for sure what they did to compare with the theory unless I actually read the article they published in the scientific journal.
When all of the analysis and modeling was complete, the scientists had to write the paper and submit it for publication. The peer review process for scientific publications can take up to a year.
So to make a long story short, results from spacecraft data that require sophisticated data analysis probably won't appear in a scientific journal until a few years after the data were actually recorded by the spacecraft. You might see pretty pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or the Mars rovers posted on the Internet within a few days or weeks of when they were recorded, but it still can take months or even years to do any serious scientific analysis of these images.
What does the parent have a 5 INFORMATIVE?
When I clicked on the link to this, I just naturally assumed "shocking" was going to be another terrible electricity pun.
We really ought to send a ship out to investigate. Better not include any unnamed ensigns, though, or they might meet with disaster.
That's why they were effected with a bow shock.
You're supposed to do your saving throws with a 20-sided die. You'll never save against anything with a tetrahedron.
Who else didn't know what a d4 was until the above poster noted that it was a 4 sided die?
and finally: Who knew what a tetrahedron was, but didn't know what a "d4" was until the above poster stated it was a die with 4 sides?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Obviously the result of translating Japanese to English on Google Translate. Consider this direct translation from today's Yomiuri on-line
Bow shock story brain my head cooked it was understood not. Now, sakesuke put away memory.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Mine would as well if I had bothered to enable it for that field :)
liqbase
No, silly! It's an old form of contraceptive. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The field collapses when the female achieves orgasm, which is why it is so ineffective.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
One more: Who else despairs about the state of the education system when people don't know the meaning and etymology of tetra- without examples? Do the d4 rollers know what a tetrapod without comparing it to various monsters?
You misspelled 'better'.
Agree on the gym though.
Check out the movies on this page for a tetrahedron you'll remember. Also it's the shape of the ammonium molecule, if you've done some organic chemistry that's burned into your mind.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Who else didn't know what either a tetrahedron or a 4 sided die look like until they looked it up?
Hint: A typical microwave oven is only used as an oven ~ 0.7% of the time.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Bruce, Many regions of the magnetosphere seem like possibilities for LDEs, including the bow shock or the magnetopause. There are articles looking into these possible sources linked to from one of the pages your search pops. The consensus seems to be that magnetospheric causes are unlikely.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
As for shocking, I think that is just a bad joke. Though these are nice results, I don't think that anyone is that surprised by them.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Very interesting Bruce! I've not heard of these before but I'll be on the listen from now on. Thanks!
-Joe W7COM
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
as a part of Bush's Gettin' Busy initiative, all the recordings were made by Alberto Gonzales. Immediately following the completion of the article, a very shiny object passed the office window and cleared Mr. Gonzales' memory. Again. Luckily, we were able to get him partially house trained again, but it's taking more and more effort. I swear to god, if that guy pees on the rug again, I'll duct tape a shiny object to his forehead and drop him off in the desert somewhere...
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Gym membership thirded.
Sorry, I didn't notice the remember how many sides a tetrahedron has, but I did notice that the article claims Science proved something. This misunderstanding of the scientific method is understandable from CNN maybe, but this is supposed to be a Geek Website.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Fortunately, as I'm reminded at every possible opportunity by this site, correlation != causation, so I just don't worry about it.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Sorry to nitpick, but it supports the theory, but doesn't "prove" it.
I'm sure that's what you meant, though.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The answer to all three, paradoxically, would be me!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The average ham who is active on HF hears about one a year. I'm an average ham. I'm active on HF. I've been on the air for almost 20 years. I've never heard one. I've read about them, but I've never heard one.
Considering snakes are technically tetrapods, that's not a very useful outlook.
Frosty piss posts are worthless, GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
The little cap where you blow into broke off and now she doesn't inflate properly. Damn will have to go buy another.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
To memory, there's one second of lag when talking to someone on the moon on the radio. One to 40 seconds would mean that unless there are multiple reflections that go unheard, whatever is doing the reflecting is located 1 to 40 times further away than the moon.
All rites reversed 2010
Correction: Earth-Moon-Earth bounce is about 2.5 seconds. - (Long-Delayed Radio Echos, Observations and Interpretations - Dr. Volker Grassmann, DF5AI, VHF Communications 2/1993, http://www.df5ai.net/ArticlesDL/LEchoes(E).pdf )
Means the echos occur somehwere between about half-way to the moon and far beyond it.
All rites reversed 2010
moi
http://kered.org
There's an archaic meaning for "prove" that means "test", as in "the exception that proves the rule".
I would likewise say I was sorry to nitpick, but that would be insincere of me.
The gym is a good idea, but my advice is, watch a couple episodes of Sex & The City, you'll wish you were a virgin and a mountain hermit.
You just got troll'd!
this is no new news...
electric universe
http://www.holoscience.com/
or
Exploring the Electric Universe
http://thunderbolts.info/home.htm
Total chaos!
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
8-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com